THINK TANK

THINK TANK; Did the Envoy of a Queen Really Dress in Drag?

By Paul Lewis

Published: March 21, 1998

Until Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani appeared in spangled pink gown, platinum-blond wig and lipstick at the Inner Circle parody show last year, only one high New York official had ever been accused of transvestism: Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, first cousin to Queen Anne and Royal Governor of the colonies of New York and New Jersey from 1702 to 1708.

Actually, Cornbury was accused of so much more, including every kind of corruption and malfeasance, that early Americans saw him as the personification of all that was wrong with England's administration of its North American colonies. And to the 19th-century American historian George Bancroft, he exhibited ''arrogance joined to intellectual imbecility.''

But now rehabilitation is at hand. This week, at a meeting of the New-York Historical Society, Patricia U. Bonomi, professor emerita of history at New York University, lectured on her new book, in which she pours cold water on Cornbury's reputation as a transvestite scoundrel. Afterward she signed copies close to the society's famous portrait supposedly showing the Governor kitted out in 18th-century drag.

In ''The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America'' (University of North Carolina Press, $29.95), she says the evidence against him does not bear examination. Even the masculine-looking lady in the portrait, which the New-York Historical Society bought for $1,000 in 1952, was said to be Cornbury in 1867, over a century after his death.

If Cornbury were as all his enemies claimed, why did London consider him an effective administrator who continued to enjoy important positions after his return from the colonies, Ms. Bonomi asks. Why are there no witness accounts of his transvestism and why did such charges find no echo in London's savagely satirical Grub Street press, which battened on the sexual peccadillos of the high and mighty?

Ms. Bonomi thinks the accusations against Cornbury were invented by a clique of colonialists who resented his firm administration and their own loss of influence when he merged the proprietory colonies of East and West Jersey into the new royal colony of New Jersey in 1702.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which a Parliament of English landowners put William and Mary on the English throne, had left the colonialists sensitive to such displays of royal authority. Meanwhile, in an age of slander and satire, malicious gossip and sexual innuendo were accepted weapons of political combat.

Between 1707 and 1709, three colonists -- Lewis Morris, Robert Livingston and Elias Neau -- wrote four letters to contacts in London accusing Cornbury of cross-dressing, though none claimed to have seen him in drag or named anyone who had.

Morris, for instance, said: ''He rarely fails of being dressed in Womens's Cloaths everyday, and almost half his time is spent that way and seldom misses it on Sacrament day, was in that Garb when his dead Lady was carried out of the Fort and this not privately but in face of the Sun and sight of the Town.''

Livingston asked his London friend to use the information for ''our advantage.''

Yet no contemporary accounts exist of these remarkable public spectacles. And a list of grievances against Cornbury drawn up by the New Jersey assembly in 1707 says nothing about transvestism.

In the end, Cornbury was removed because of political changes in London. Yet for Ms. Bonomi, the campaign against him reflects an age when ''politics was personalized and reduced to slander, libel and the destruction of reputation.''

Maybe. But while angry colonists would naturally accuse an unpopular Governor of corruption, transvestism is an unusual charge to invent against anyone. Moreover, the rumor proved remarkably persistent.

In 1714 his sucessor, Robert Hunter, described Cornbury as ''a Devotee to Long Robes of both Gendres.'' And his aunt, Lady Frances Keightly, recorded his death in 1723 with the words, ''Lay not his follies to his charge.''

In 1714 a German diplomat, Baron von Bothmer, wrote that Cornbury ''thought it necessary for him, in order to represent Her Majesty, to dress himself as a woman.'' And in 1796, Horace Walpole repeated the claim, quoting Cornbury as saying he wanted to represent Queen Anne ''as faithfully as I can.''

In an 1820 memoir, Janet Livingston Montgomery recounted that her step-grandmother, who had been in New York with Cornbury, said he had vowed to wear women's clothes one month a year.

And in 1847, Agnes Strickland wrote in ''The Lives of the Queens of England'' that Cornbury ''dressed up in complete female court costume, because, truly, he represented the person of a female sovereign.''

It seems that whether rumors about dressing in drag are a tribute or a slander is in the eyes of the beholder.

Photo: A portrait long thought to be of Lord Cornbury, an early New York colonial governor. But a new book says the subject was a woman and the official a victim of political gossip. (The New-York Historical Society)